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But, at their best, they are thrillingly fabular, giving us the sense that we are witnessing a shadow play, our attention absorbed while elsewhere something fundamental takes place.

And yet in the end I couldn’t quite swoon as much as everyone else – and though this is a film which pays tribute to people who are different, it does so in the reassuring rhetoric of fabular unreality.

Those who have been socio-economically repressed – fighting men, former squaddies, Travellers – resurge in this rich, fabular novel, as does something more radical and doomed: a pre-capitalist morality.

The fabular quality that makes Green’s clothes feel like plausible garb for the interstellar colonists of the early twenty-second century has also endeared them to the pop stars of the early twenty-first.

The photograph is from the late 1960s, but its form is so iconic and its atmosphere so fabular that it could have been made a hundred years earlier.